Safeguard Bees and Beekeepers in Madagascar

A key part of project Renitantely is providing our beekeepers with skills such as honey and wax harvesting and keeping hives healthy. Successful beekeeping involves developing an understanding of intensive skills and complicated scientific concepts, so it is fairly unrealistic to expect people to fully remember all of these concepts after the initial training workshop.

This presents a challenge for the Renitantely team, since many of our project beekeepers are illiterate or haven’t received a full education. As such, written documents for our beekeepers to refer to following the training workshop are not the most useful resources we can provide. However, SEED strives to ensure that our training has a lasting educational benefit, and during the first phase of Project Renitantely the team came up with a creative solution: Visual Learning Aids (VLAs).

These innovative educational resources use imagery that is easy to understand and give clear visual reminders about the various stages of the beekeeping process. During each training workshop led by our beekeeping technicians, new concepts are introduced using interactive demonstrations that can be consolidated with the VLAs. Then, following the workshops, each beekeeper receives a laminated copy of the VLAs to take home with them for future use.

VLAs are also used to communicate technical beekeeping skills, such as splitting a hive in order to populate another hive. Designing these technical VLAs involves breaking the process down into simple steps that can be diagrammed in an intuitive image.

During the second phase of Renitantely, SEED will continue to develop VLAs to more effectively communicate beekeeping skills and expand the knowledge that we can share through these resources.